Monday, October 1, 2012

The Yom Kippur War and the Kissinger Plot

US State Department documents that were
declassified over a year ago prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Henry
Kissinger took deliberate action to cause the outbreak in 1973 of a war that
would cause Israel to make concessions on the one hand, and move Egypt into the
embrace of the US on the other.

On 13 October 1973, in the middle of the
Yom Kippur war, Kissinger said:

“Wehad two objectives in the
war: to maintain contact with both sides. For this the best outcome would be an
Israeli victory but it would come at a high price, so we could insist that they
ensure their security through negotiations, not through military power. Second,
we attempted to produce a situation where the Arabs would conclude the only way
to peace was through us.
But during the war we had to show the Israelis they had to depend on us to
win and couldn't win if we were to recalcitrant.”

[It should
probably read: "and couldn't win if they were too
recalcitrant” -se]

This is an
important statement in which Kissinger outlined the objectives of the
Yom Kippur War for the US. He was not only considering what advantages
were likely to accrue to the US from the war; his words unequivocally indicate
that those objectives had been determined before the outbreak of hostilities. Otherwise
how can the contrast between the formulation “[b]ut during the war” and what was
said previously be explained? In other words: all the words stated in the first
part of the above-quoted paragraph related to objectives that had been set by
Kissinger before the beginning of the war on 6 October!

If for all that
there remains a shadow of a doubt about the validity of this interpretation, it
must surely evaporate upon examination of two other documents that have been
declassified by the State Department.

On 7 October
Kissinger received a message from Hafiz Ismail, Egyptian President Sadat’s
national security advisor. Among other things, Ismail stated the following in
that message:

“Allow
me to make it clear once more:

“5. Our basic objective remains as always, the
achievement of peacein the Middle East and not to achieve
partial settlements.

“6.
We do not intend to deepen the engagements or widen theconfrontation.”

A few hours later, Kissinger said, in an internal discussion: “They[the Arabs -se] have
done pretty well. Implacement won’t be completeuntil tomorrow. Then Ismail sent me a message
suggesting possibleframework for negotiations. Not yet adequate.”

Why
was it not yet adequate for Kissinger? The clearly obvious answer, taking into
account his words of 13 October quoted above, is: on 7 October the conditions
that would satisfy the objectives of the American Secretary of State had not
yet been created. That was because on the one hand, Israel had not yet “taken
it on the chin” enough, so the American Secretary of State did not think that
Israel would be willing to make sufficient concessions; and on the other hand, and
no less importantly, the Egyptians had not yet suffered so much that they would
beg Kissinger to come to their rescue and break their ties to the USSR. What we
have here is a plot by Kissinger, which explains why he opposed Sadat’s efforts
back in the beginning of 1973 to reach an interim agreement between Israel and
Egypt (as the Israeli Plotrast yresearchers
Professor Uri Bar-Yosef and Professor Yigal Kipnis claim without giving
adequate answers to his motives). And the existence of such a plot would also
explain the evidence that the American intelligence community had received an
order from above – that is, from Kissinger – to ignore the many indications
that war was coming.

“For example, transcripts received after the war by Matti Golan, then a
political correspondent for Haaretz, show that U.S. Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger told Meir that the Yom Kippur War could have been prevented through
diplomacy. He was talking
about Washington's support for Israel's efforts to preserve diplomatic
paralysis in response to a peace plan proposed by Sadat, which called for
an agreement with Israel provided it return the Egyptian territory captured in
1967. The following excerpt of Hebrew notes refers to Kissinger's meetings with
Sadat's adviser Hafez Ismail:‘I don't want to blame anyone, but during 1973 it was possible to
prevent the war. Do you remember when I reported on my meetings with Hafez
Ismail? What did I do in those meetings? I spoke with him about the weather and
every other topic in the world, just so we didn't touch on the main subject of
an agreement ... I attempted
to gain time and postpone the serious stage another month, another year
... To what extent did we really desire talks? I would say that the effort we
made was very small. In effect we waved these talks around to calm Sadat, to
give him a reason to sit back quietly.’ (translation by Haaretz).In February 1973, Ismail presented Kissinger with a new political
initiative; this is a matter of public knowledge. Its proposals, one of which
was a schedule for political talks that would end by September 1973, are less
well known. After the war, reaching an Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement
required all of the talent, standing, will and energy that a statesman like
Kissinger could muster, but the outcome looked a lot like what Sadat had sought
before the war.”

There
were definitely few, if any, parties to this plan of Kissinger’s who knew the
whole secret. Certainly neither Sadat nor the government of Israel were aware
of Kissinger’s goals, since they were its objects/victims. Kissinger had no need
for Israeli partners, or even Egyptian ones. It was enough for him to apply
strong pressure on Israel not to mobilize the reserves and/or to launch a
preventive strike, regardless of the large amount of information about the
approaching war, while sabotaging Sadat’s efforts to open negotiations with
Israel.

“It is 9 A.M. on August 12. Not today, but 1974. The place is the
White House. Gerald Ford is in the Oval Office in just his fourth day as
president. With him is his mentor, Dr. Henry Kissinger, U.S. secretary of state
and national security adviser.

“Kissinger, the hero of the peace process
following the Yom Kippur War, is briefing the neophyte Ford.

“Kissinger: ‘After 1967 I [I!] operated on the
basis of the historical illusion that the Arabs were militarily impotent, and
U.S. support was firm. [Yitzhak] Rabin told me, 'We never had it so good' ...
Before the October War, we tried to create such frustrations that the Arabs
would leave the Soviet Union and come to us... We didn't expect the October
War.’”

“Ford: ‘But wasn't it helpful?’”

“Kissinger: ‘We couldn't have done better if we had set the scenario.’“Ford: ‘Even the heavy Israeli losses helped,
didn't they?’”

There is no doubt that Kissinger is concealing more than he is revealing
here, in that he did not tell the whole truth. Indeed he did admit that he had
placed barriers before the Arabs and prevented an agreement, but he was not
ready to admit that he had definitely anticipated the October War. His jest
that “[w]e couldn't have
done better if we had set the scenario” should not be taken literally; rather the words and
their order should be changed as follows: “the success was above and beyond our
expectations, and completely fulfilled the scenario that we had set.”

There can be no reasonable doubt that Kissinger played God, for which many
paid with their health and their lives. He was not satisfied with a “mere” agreement
that would have prevented the war. He had to compel the Arabs to abandon the
USSR. Would Sadat not have done that without war, if the US had applied
sufficient pressure on Israel, pressure on a scale similar to that which was
applied to prevent the mobilization of the reserves?